“Demand of Participants” or “Supply of Opportunities”: Measuring Accessibility of Activity Places Based on Time Geographic Approach

Abstract

People participate in various activity places in leading their livelihood pattern (raising family, working, shopping, recreation, socializing, etc.) to have services/opportunities within their reach. Activity in urban opportunity places requires space and time, which in turns are subject to accessibility of those opportunity places. An activity-based approach within a time–geographic framework can explain how accessible the opportunity places are, considering space (travel barrier) and time (limited time) constraints. This study uses two checks to measure the accessibility of an opportunity: (1) whether the opportunity place is within the daily potential path area of a participant and (2) whether the participant’s activity reach time is within the opportunity opening hours. Potential path area delimits a geographical area containing all feasible routes and urban opportunities given the space–time constraints determined by the particular pair of fixed out-of-home activities. Then the daily potential path area is prepared by aggregating all individual potential path areas in a day. This study presents the accessibility level of ten major urban opportunity places, which are selected based on the frequency of participation by the university teachers and students of Khulna. This paper concludes by explaining the usability of the activity-based approach used in this accessibility study over conventional accessibility measuring approaches.